My daughter just finished her freshman year of college, and I found out she failed two subjects. She was living on campus, and she decided to work on weekends. My husband and I told her that her priority was school, but she said she was fine. She has always had trouble relating to people, so work was distracting. Also, she has ADHD.
My husband is very angry now with her grades and doesn’t want to pay for her school anymore. He wants her to stop studying next semester and just work so that she can be more mature and responsible. What do you think? Would that be good for her?
With this stressful tangle of people and feelings, I’m glad you’re reaching out for help. First, let me normalize your daughter’s experience in her first year of college. Of the thousands of first-year students I’ve known over the last 25 years, at least a third only pass some of their classes, and at least half have had some kind of academic or social disappointment. And probably most, if not all, have disappointed their parents!
Freshman year is never like students (or parents, for that matter) expect it to be. And that’s because everyone forgets that going to college is about SO MUCH MORE than classes and grades. It’s a big murky soup of social and intellectual experiences, all happening away from the parental vessel of love, guidance, rules, and expectations that have shaped the student’s world thus far. The love tends to travel well. But guidance, rules, and expectations—the ones you have helped establish—stay home with you. It’s the student’s job to find guidance, learn/adhere to/break/bend rules, and set expectations in their new home at school. So it’s super important to take all of their college experience, especially the first year, as part of the overarching learning process of becoming an adult. And on your end, becoming the parent of an adult. Neither one is a simple task.
Rest assured: your daughter hasn’t forgotten any of what she learned in her time at home with you. The fact that she wanted to work and followed through on it (and earned money! and didn’t get fired!) is evidence of the good lessons she learned as your child. And now, her first lesson as a young adult is that she underestimated her academic obligations. She has also learned that she didn’t have a mechanism for discovering that she wasn’t meeting those obligations along the way. Sounds like normal first-year stuff to me.
But there are choices in how you all look at this first year. Not passing some of her classes is the empty half of the cup. Here’s the full half: she stretched herself in fantastic ways that a first-year college student should be stretching. You’ve suggested that work was a way of avoiding relating to people, which may very well be the case. But in her work role, she was relating professionally to people (maybe not peers). That counts as relating! I know many young people who have trouble connecting with peers but feel more comfortable with people who are older than they are.
And in her academics, she identified that she needs to learn better tools for managing time and being an effective and efficient student. All failures are about learning. And failing forward is about using the half-full paradigm to expand the good rather than remediate what’s wrong. So I would focus on helping her discover what she learned from the successes and the failures. What was good about working weekends? What was good about passing the classes she passed? What does she want to do differently moving forward?
She may be as surprised as you are that she didn’t pass all her classes. If she genuinely didn’t see what was happening, you can help her to build better skills and use resources the school may have for staying informed (office hours… advising… academic support resources…). From your parent-view, it might look like all of this should have been obvious, but that’s because grown-ups tend to have what’s called “unconscious expertise.” That is, we’re so expert at stuff we don’t even realize how much we know. The job of parents is to see the ways their kids are having trouble and see if there’s some expert tool you can show them that you don’t realize you use all the time. Think of driving a car as an example. Unless you like to test the laws of physics, you slow going into the turn and accelerate coming out of it. You don’t even think about it; you just do it. But a new driver needs to be shown. New college students need to be shown tools for planning and managing time, need to learn skills for anticipating workflow, skills for navigating syllabi and online learning systems, and so on. Until it’s intuitive, it’s not.
Meanwhile, there are also questions it will help to ask yourselves: What lesson or skill did you hope your daughter learned that needs to be revisited? What are our expectations of your daughter? How are your husband’s and your expectations different from one another? Do they need to be the same? How does his anger determine how you’ll make decisions as a couple? What are you feeling (besides desperate) about what’s happening? Money is always a tricky topic as kids become adults. Deciding what your financial relationship with your daughter is as you move forward is worth thinking about.
You mention that your husband is angry at her, and you feel desperate. I’ll take a leap here and float the idea that his anger and your feelings may be a murky soup of anger (at her and maybe others?), fear, anxiety, regret, etc. It’s worth unpacking some of that so that any conversation with your daughter can be about her and not your feelings about her.
Good luck!
